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Red Chair and Honey

I’m still uploading the last sketchbook – only a few pages left to go. The scanned ones are in a set on Flickr. The left page is my beautiful, red, desperately uncomfortable Ikea chair (in the rental house in Auchenflower) and the right page is my father’s hands and a view past him to the living room (in my parents’ house in Hattonvale).

I have been house hunting, and on Tuesday morning before work I inspected a house which had bees living in its back wall, crawling in and out between the fibro near the rear door. You could smell the honey. The previous owner had “liked having them there” and his successors are trying to get the bees humanely moved out.

They were European bees, but when we lived out west we had Australian native bees – tiny and black and stingless and with a sad tendency to drown in the butter on picnics. My father, who was always acquiring interesting injuries while working, once drove up to the front gate with the chainsaw to cut down a dead tree that had the temerity to try to drop a branch on him. He came back a short while later with his arm – black and dripping – held out the window. My mother was used to him returning in this state, but was surprised when he held out his arm and said, “Lick this!” The tree was full of honey.

I’ve been keeping most things to the bare minimum lately, due to house hunting, but that seems to be coming to a head so I will soon put up: